Last Thursday evening, the remodelled Dirac Science Library at Florida State University was formally opened, with Graham as guest speaker at the ceremony. The Library, first opened in 1989 by Dirac’s wife Manci, now has 250 additional seats and a host of new facilities, including large wireless displays for collaborative work, a high-quality recording studio, nineteen study rooms and a spacious new Starbucks.

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What Reviewers are Saying

Lisa Jardine, Financial Times

'A story as gripping as it is elegantly argued ... a wonderful companion piece to one of the most authoritative books on this subject, Richard Rhodes's epic The Making of the Atomic Bomb.'Read the full review

Sir Max Hastings, Sunday Times

'[An] excellent book ... Farmelo is a splendid word-portraitist, and his book charts the odysseys, geographical as well as scientific, of the men who played a key role in developing the bomb ... authoritative and superbly readable.'Read the full review ($)

Peter Forbes, The Independent

'Graham Farmelo's very fine book ... illuminates the nexus between science, politics, war, and even literature better than anything I have read for some time. The issues it raises are both eternal and especially pressing now. It is not yet Book of the Year time but this has to be a contender.'Read the full review

Lawrence Freedman, Foreign Affairs

'In this terrific book, Farmelo ... demonstrates that although principles and evidence often shape the relationship between science and policy, personality and politics play just as large a role.'Read the full review

Claire Tomalin

'A remarkable and important book ... Graham Farmelo draws a highly readable and original portrait of Churchill as he dealt in secret with scientists and politicans over the development of nuclear weapons'

Paul Addison, Literary Review

'Superbly written, with a Lindemann-like flair for the translation of scientific data into layman's terms, it is a narrative driven by personalities ... and studded with memorable cameos of the scientists, politicians and bureaucrats involved.'

Nicholas Mancusi, Daily Beast

'This is a complex and engrossing history with obvious geopolitical import, but what's most interesting is the human drama involving Churchill, FDR, and the constellation of scientific egos circling around them. Farmelo also wonderfully draws out Churchill's surprising futurism...'Read the full review

Jeremy Bernstein, Wall Street Journal

'The Strangest Man ... is one of the best biographies of a scientist that I know. [Churchill's Bomb], like that one, shows a keen sense of the human comedy. Who were these people, and why did they behave the way they did?' Read the full review ($)

Michael Frayn

'A terrific narrative, which casts a new light on Churchill, the Allied atomic bomb project, and the history and aftermath of the Second World War.'

Ian Thomson, Daily Telegraph

'Superb ... Few writers can make the mechanics of H-bomb production interesting: Farmelo can. Churchill’s Bomb, equally as good as his award-winning biography of the physicist Paul Dirac ... sheds light on a little-known aspect of Churchill’s life and does so with flair and narrative verve.'Read the full review

Piers Brendon, Guardian

In 'this dazzling book' ... 'Farmelo recounts this important story with skill and erudition'. Read the full review

Robin McKie, Observer

'Absorbing ... Farmelo's account of Churchill's atomic dreams perfectly captures the essence of the man and of the science of the day.' Read the full review

Daniel Johnson, The Times (UK)

'Churchill's Bomb tells [a] dramatic story and tells it brilliantly... Farmelo ingeniously interweaves the narratives of the nuclear scientists, many of them Jewish refugees from Germany, with that of Churchill in war and peace. As the Americans enter the picture the story becomes fiendishly complicated, but the author never loses the thread.'

Steven Shapin (Harvard University), LRB

'Compelling.... The value of Farmelo's book is in its meticulous attention to the contingencies, accidents, uncertainties, inconsistencies and idiosyncratic personalities in the story of how Britain didn't get the Bomb during the war and how it did get it afterwards. It could all have turned out differently – but it didn't.' Read the full review

Hank Cox, Washington Post

'On the eve of World War II, British scientists were well ahead of the United States in the basic research to make a nuclear weapon possible. How the United States wrested that leadership away from Great Britain is the topic of Graham Farmelo's account of a little-known aspect of the war.... [T]his is an interesting story.' Read the full review

Antoine Capet, Cercles

'Churchill's Bomb evidently fills an essential gap, and as such will be welcome not only among 'Churchill scholars', but also by a wider readership. … All University libraries should naturally have a copy of this superbly informative monograph, while it would make an excellent present for anyone, young and old, interested in Churchill' Read the full review

Gerard DeGroot, Physics World

'Intriguing .... [the book's] brilliance lies in the way the story is told, for it is a tale not just of physics or politics but also, more importantly, of people.' Read the full review

Bill Purdue, Times Higher Education

'Splendid and original ... in interweaving the political and scientific, Farmelo succeeds in making the latter beautifully clear even to readers with scant background in the subject.'Read the full review

Vin Arthey, The Scotsman

'... a page-turner ... scrupulously researched and superbly written ... Churchill's Bomb is a powerful and moving contribution to literature about the 20th century and to biographical and historical writing...'Read the full review

Martin Underwood, IHPST Newsletter, April-May 2014

'A very fine book. ... Graham Farmalo has produced a fine narrative and explains in a clear, lucid manner Churchill's often confused views on The Bomb and possible deployment.'Read the full review (PDF)

Katie Engelhart, Maclean's Magazine

'Farmelo's writing is lyrical - and is chock-full of personality. Readers will delight in ... the tale of Churchill's first meeting with Niels Bohr.'Read the full review

Publishers Weekly (US)

'Farmelo ends each chapter with a cliffhanger that will keep readers paging through this thoroughly researched, detailed history of Britain’s involvement with nuclear energy in the WWII era and beyond.... Farmelo’s prose moves quickly with much action .... Highly recommended for those with an interest in weaponry, the WWII era, and British history.'Read the full review

Nicholas Sambaluk, U.S. Military Academy, West Point

Benjamin Wilson, Physics Today

'Entertaining... the real strength of Churchill's Bomb rests with its lively sketches of British nuclear scientists and their world. Farmelo expertly draws their personalities and relationships, and their struggles with the Whitehall bureaucracy.'Read the full review

Jason Ridler, Failure Magazine

'Graham Farmelo reconstructs this intense, delicate, and near-Faustian story with wit, detail, and richness...' Read the full review

Norman Dombey, Contemporary Physics

'Farmelo ... has written another enthralling book which I think will be of great interest to both historians and physicists' Read the full review

Chris Wrigley, Journal of Modern History

'Churchill's Bomb is an outstanding work on international politics and the history of science... It deserves a wide audience.' Read the full review ($)

Christopher Coker, TLS

'Graham Farmelo shows ... that Churchill floundered when it actually came to building the Bomb after the USA entered the war...' Read the full review ($)

Roger Highfield

'A riveting, powerful and timely reminder that high politics is anything but rational. Graham Farmelo vividly reveals how Winston Churchill learned about atomic physics in the 1920s, warned about the imminence of nuclear weapons in the 30s and yet, paradoxically, squandered Britain's lead in the field during the Second World War.'

Sir Michael Berry, University of Bristol

'What a brilliant and compelling book! Graham Farmelo sensitively and eloquently deconstructs the twists and turns of Winston Churchill's involvement with nuclear weapons over nearly half a century, setting this unfamiliar tale in the context of the turbulent times. At its heart are the ambiguities of the World War II relationship between a scientifically innovative but economically weakened Britain and the inexhaustibly energetic USA with unlimited resources.'

James W. Muller, University of Alaska

'An excellent book... Graham Farmelo draws on many sources to show how Churchill, his scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann, and a host of other scientists and politicians developed the atomic bomb. Churchill’s Bomb brings these characters back to life with anecdotes, quotations, and personal sketches. But Farmelo's book does more than unfold the hopes, doubts, and fears engendered by the Bomb: it illuminates the relationship between big science and modern democracy.'

Mary Jo Nye, Oregon State University

'This is a fascinating book. Graham Farmelo offers a fresh and thoroughly researched history of the development of atomic weapons in his insightful and engaging account of Winston Churchill's failure to forge a partnership of equal exchange between Great Britain and the United States in the development of the bomb. Farmelo offers vivid vignettes of political and scientific personalities, with special attention to the widely disliked Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, who became Churchill's science and technology guru in the 1920s.'

Brian Cathcart, author of 'Test of Greatness'

'It has been rightly said that the arrival of nuclear weapons drew a line across history beyond which nothing could be the same again. This readable and ingenious book, by an outstanding historian of science, sheds a brilliant new light on the drawing of that line. The British role has been too long neglected and the Churchillian perspective is fascinating: both are revealed here with all of Farmelo's characteristic rigour and panache.'

Andrew Brown, author of biographies of James Chadwick and Joseph Rotblat

'Churchill's curiosity about science is perhaps the least studied aspect of his character. Graham Farmelo remedies that deficit in masterful style, beginning with Churchill's admiration for H G Wells and ending with a poignant portrait of the elderly statesman brooding over the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.'

What Reviewers Said

Oliver Sachs

'Did Paul Dirac, a supreme theoretical physicist -- the Einstein of quantum mechanics -- have Asperger's syndrome? Certainly he was a very peculiar man, but brilliant and compelling, as Farmelo's wonderful and sensitive portrait brings out.'Read the full review

LOUISA GILDER, NYT

‘This biography is a gift. [..] the most satisfying and memorable biography I have read in years.’Read the full review

Peter Higgs, Times (UK)

‘Fascinating reading… Graham Farmelo has done a splendid job of portraying Dirac and his world. The biography is a major achievement.’

Daily Telegraph, UK

‘If Newton was the Shakespeare of British physics, Dirac was its Milton, the most fascinating and enigmatic of all our great scientists. And he now has a biography to match his talents: a wonderful book by Graham Farmelo. The story it tells is moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.’Read the full review

Brian Cathcart, New Statesman

The Economist

‘[A] sympathetic portrait….Of the small group of young men who developed quantum mechanics and revolutionized physics almost a century ago, he truly stands out. Paul Dirac was a strange man in a strange world. This biography, long overdue, is most welcome.’

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Times Higher Education Supplement

‘A page-turner about Dirac and quantum physics seems a contradiction in terms, but Graham Farmelo’s new book, The Strangest Man, is an eminently readable account of the developments in physics throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s and the life of one of the discipline’s key scientists.’Read the full review

New Scientist

‘Enthralling… Regardless of whether Dirac was autistic or simply unpleasant, he is an icon of modern thought and Farmelo’s book gives us a genuine insight into his life and times.’Read the full review [paywalled]

Kirkus

‘Paul Dirac was a giant of 20th-century physics, and this rich, satisfying biography does him justice…. [A] nuanced portrayal of an introverted eccentric who held his own in a small clique of revolutionary scientific geniuses.’Read the full review